Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not to go all meme on you, but let me FTFY:

Google wanted a platform that prevented Microsoft and Apple from beating them to control of the next big advertising platform.

Nothing more, nothing less. "Open" has been shown conclusively to take a back seat to monetization. It is as much a marketing tactic (in the sense that it's useful to promote the platform, but can and will be discarded, with spin to explain why, when its usefulness decreases) as anything in Microsoft's or Apple's ads.

And it doesn't matter how you try to downplay it: companies other than Google have, whether they intended to or not, accomplished undeniable good through things they've shipped. Apple, for example, has contributed monumentally to LLVM, which is a large and useful public good. But it did so more or less explicitly to screw the GPL.

So, faced with all the major players doing this in some form or another, how, precisely, do you plan to rank them relative to each other in order to discern which one is "good" or at least "least bad"?

I give Apple props for for their contributions to LLVM or WebKit (and OpenCL, and Darwin), no one is saying they haven't done any good things for the ecosystem, but that doesn't erase the egregious damage that the iOS T&C impose on the ability of people to do what they want with their devices. To me, that ranks them lower. That, and the aggressive "thermonuclear" offensive litigiousness they have, not just on patents, but even going back to the Look-and-Feel lawsuit of the 90s. I'm an Apple fan boy when it comes to their hardware, I've owned every Apple device, I own an iPhone 5S, the A7 is remarkable. I love the hardware, I hate the closed nature of the platform, the fact that I need to jailbreak my device to have ownership of it.

For the average consumer, control of "the next big advertising platform" is a meaningless abstraction, it matters to people in the ad buying business, not consumers who generally don't like ads in the first place, and tolerate them mostly to get free stuff. And how does Android "control" mobile web advertising anyway?

But for the average consumer, telling them they can't install App X on their device that they spent $300 on because Apple censors don't like it is much more direct.

No company is perfect, but I can say as a Googler, your cynicism is basically wrong, that open source isn't just a marketing tactic, but that the rank and file at the lowest levels of the company, culturally believe in it. Google has disappointed in the past on the degree of openness, and there is much to improve, so I am not uncritical of it in this regard, but if you were to query the rank of file of Microsoft and Apple with regards to open source, and Googlers, you'd find a lot more zealots at Google.

The world isn't black and white, it's shades of gray, and some are just a much brighter shade of gray than others.

I'd go so far as to say that Windows RT is more open than iOS-with Windows RT you have built in Windows Explorer, and command line access. And a non crippled browser (desktop IE 11 vs mobile Safari).

Given the context of this discussion, it must be mentioned that LLVM license do not include a patent grant. Apple has patented several frontends of LLVM, and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM. Apple could do a oracle at any time.

"and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM"

While I work for Google, and was involved in the CPTN and Rockstar stuff (and thus can't comment on this article at all, though I wish I could), i can actually point out that this statement is not right.

First, companies that wish to contribute to LLVM are asked to non-assert patents involved in their contributions. This is covered in the dev policy, and has been for a long time. Their are non-assertions/grants on file for a number of companies now.

As for whether Apple owns any patents on LLVM core, Chris Lattner himself told me Apple held none, which is why they had not filed a non-assertion.

Apple may or may not hold patents on LLVM code that is not "in tree" (so yes, they may have non-public frontends or backends they own patents on), and I never specifically asked about the clang frontend, but I trust Chris enough to know that if there was in-project code, be it clang or core or whatever, he would have followed the dev policy and Apple would have non-asserted them.

While thats nice and all, Apple has made no binding or even public statement to that fact. They also have at least one patent which mention LLVM by name (Converting javascript into a device-independent representation), even if that "just" is a frontend.

There is simply nothing that prevents apple from using patents against LLVM users. We can only hope that none of their numerous vaguely written patents cover any technology used by LLVM or any of their frontends like Clang.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com